


Not just a River in Egypt

by queenofchildren



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Casual Sex, F/M, Fluffy Ending, angsty, with feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-09
Updated: 2015-10-09
Packaged: 2018-04-25 13:53:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4963114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queenofchildren/pseuds/queenofchildren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clarke keeps telling herself that it's nothing more than casual sex. (She's probably lying.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not just a River in Egypt

Clarke has no idea how this keeps happening, but here she is, pinning her best friend’s brother against a wall and watching as his expression shifts from surprise to wild hunger. She soaks it in for a moment, this sign of how much he wants her, and revels in the way it makes her feel, her body practically humming with anticipation for what’s to come.

And she knows exactly what’s going to happen next, knows because it’s been happening with increasing frequency lately. It started one night when one of their fights, barely disguised as a passionate discussion, spiralled out of control and got them thrown out of the bar. Leaving their annoyed friends behind, they continued their screaming match in the street outside his apartment, and from one second to the next, they had been in this exact same position, with his back against the wall and her lips on his and her hands on his shoulders not so much holding him in place as holding herself up when she practically melted.

They barely made it up the stairs to his place before they all but clawed each other’s clothes off.

That was six months ago, and she still hasn’t managed to quit.  

It doesn’t mean anything, of course. It’s just physical release – a very convenient, very efficient form of distracting herself on days when everything gets a little too much, when it’s either this or getting blind drunk with Raven and Octavia, and at least this doesn’t give her a hangover.  

It’s convenient because their little group tends to stick together and ignore everyone else when they go out, even on nights where the bar is packed and Clarke could have her pick of hot men and women, the most attractive of whom Octavia dutifully points out to her. But hitting on one of them would mean leaving her comfort zone, and that’s precisely what she does not want to do on the kind of nights Bellamy happens. It doesn’t hurt that he lives literally next door to their regular watering hole, so it’s conveniently close and they always make it up the stairs before they can risk getting discovered by the others.

As for efficiency… well, let’s just say from the moment one of them leaves under a pretext and waits for the other to catch up, it usually doesn’t take long until she’s forgotten all about whatever drove her here that night, up to and including her own name. He may be insufferable, but he knows what he’s doing, and Clarke often finds herself mentally replaying their most recent encounter for hours after she’s snuck out of his apartment.

And it’s not like they  _only_  fuck. They do talk, sometimes, because in the semi-darkness of his bedroom, illuminated only by the flickering red neon sign of the bar downstairs, it’s somehow easy to say things she doesn’t tell anyone else, protected by darkness and the smooth heaviness of those in-between moments and the distance between them that, by now, is probably kept up by sheer force of will alone. Some days she lets him pull her close, her back nestled against his chest so that she can feel his heartbeat slowing down, until it becomes almost too much and she has to retreat from the increasingly thin ice they’re getting on.

Luckily, it’s usually easy to distract him by taking his hand from where it rests, almost possessively, on her stomach and placing it on her breasts, by grinding against him until she feels him harden again and he knows she’s done talking. He never protests, but sometimes his movements are slow then, hesitant, as if he wants to make sure with every caress that this is really what she wants. Almost out of spite, she makes her touches harsh and frenzied in response, her kisses punishing, until she’s chased that tender, worried look off his face and replaced it with raw desire once more.

But lately, she has to work harder and harder to do that, and it happens more and more often that she catches him hesitating, looking at her as if there’s something he wants to say, and whenever that happens, something inside her clenches with fear that he’ll end whatever this is between them. She gets almost ferocious trying to prevent that from happening, which has led to a few unforgettable encounters, one of which left him with scratch marks all down his back. She knows, deep down, that things can’t continue like this – but she also can’t quite imagine continuing  _without_  this.

Luckily, she caught him early today, just outside the bar and on the way to the entrance to his building, so she doesn’t even have to act normal in front of their friends before sneaking out to meet him. She jumps him right then and there, pushing him against the wall and kissing him until his surprise is replaced by a different kind of tension.

But something’s different today: After only a few short, breathless moments, he’s already pushing her away to look at her.

“You got here pretty late.”

“I had dinner with my mom.”

Dinner with her mom often precedes their encounters, and he knows better than to ask for details on those nights, at least until they’re both naked and exhausted in his bed and her defenses are down, weakened by hormones she can name but never withstand.

But tonight, instead of doing his best to make her forget about the fact that Clarke and the woman who was once her closest confidante haven’t done more than smalltalk in over a year, he keeps looking at her, even taking her wrist and stopping her when she tries to snake her hand down the front of his jeans, normally a sure-fire way to speed things up.

“Clarke, are you sure this is what you really want?”

“Yes. I want to forget about this shitshow of a day, so it’s either going home with you or going in there,” she nods in the direction of the bar, “getting completely shitfaced, and finding someone else to fuck. Your call.”

She has voiced it crudely, antagonisingly, on purpose, and her words don’t fail to make him grit his teeth, causing his jaw to twitch.

“Blackmailing? Classy.”

She may be imagining it, but for a second, Clarke thinks he sounds almost… hurt. Which is impossible. Why should he care who she goes home with? That’s not what they are, they don’t care about each other. And yet…

She doesn’t get to dwell on it any longer because he kisses her then, hot and hard, taking her breath away, before he grabs her hand and pulls her upstairs, pushing her through the door and pausing only long enough to kick it shut before he grabs her thighs and hoists her up on the table by the door where he keeps his keys and phone. It’s the perfect height so that each of his movements sends delicious friction through her, and even more so when she pulls up her legs and hooks them around him to pull him close.

They don’t stay in the hallway for long, because soon enough, she’s moaning against his neck and tearing off her shirt and he picks her up again and carries her over to the bedroom, lowering her onto the bed. But no matter how much she tries to undo the weird tonal change between them today and return to their usual dynamic of no-questions-asked, impersonal sex, Clarke doesn’t quite manage – and Bellamy doesn’t let her, for whatever reason. When she tries to push him down and straddle him, he flips her onto her back and starts slowly kissing down the length of her body, ignoring her hints that she’s good on foreplay and would like to proceed to the next part now. Not that the foreplay’s bad, per se, but she’s not used to this, she’s used to calling the shots, and that means sex that is fast and hard and more often than not does not require all that much eye contact. She’s not used to how _intimate_  he’s making things today, with his eyes firmly locked on hers, his body flush against hers and his thrusts when he finally gets a condom and pushes into her slow and thorough no matter how much she tries to make him go faster.

Afterwards, the dreamy afterglow feels heavier than usual, not enough to be stifling but just enough to make her not want to get up any time soon, much less to put on her clothes and venture out into the night. So she doesn’t resist when he pulls her close and presses a soft kiss to her shoulder, just molds herself against him in an almost automatic response, as if her body knew something she doesn’t. And maybe it does, because while her mind is racing with confused, half-formulated thoughts, her body is comfortably tucked against his, waves of sensation still washing over her as his hands start tracing soft patterns over her post-orgasmically sensitive skin. There’s something going on here, and she’s this close to figuring it out when he says it:

“You should stay.” She doesn’t reply at first, her mind racing as the last puzzle piece finally falls into place, and he continues, his hands never stopping their gentle caresses (which, in hindsight, is really quite a dirty tactic): “I mean, if you want to.”

And without making a conscious decision, she knows that she does want to stay, and it’s not just because it’s cold and dark and wet outside – it’s because she likes the idea, likes  _him_ enough to break the first rule of their casual arrangement: Don’t spend the night. They’ve held on fast to that rule, even when they stayed up late enough that her return home coincided with breakfast. She has never actually slept here, because that’s not what one does with people one has very complicated, maybe-not-that-casual sex with.

She does not allow herself to wonder what it will do to their “casual”-status if she stays tonight, because if she starts thinking about it, she’ll have to come clean about a lot of things happening here, and she’s too tired and heavy and content to do that right now.

Unfortunately, Bellamy is apparently not too tired to do a whole lot of thinking and talking and coming clean.

“I don’t want you to fuck other people.” It takes her a moment to remember what she said to him earlier that night, about finding someone else to go home with. It was an empty threat, she knows now, but apparently, he didn’t know that and it bothered him, and now she feels a little bad about it. It reeks of emotional blackmail – but then again, how was she to know that  _emotional_  was an aspect of their strange relationship? “In fact, I don’t want  _us_  to just  _fuck_.”

She should have seen this coming, after the way he looked at her, touched her tonight, and after she just opened the door to this sort of thing by staying, but she nonetheless tenses for a moment, an instinctive, irrational reaction. She’s still waiting for her flight-instinct to kick in and propel her out of bed and out of his life for good when he explains:

“I know this was never supposed to mean anything, but… I don’t want that anymore. I can’t continue the way we started out.”

That’s a hefty bit of information to take in, and to his credit, he gives her plenty of time to do so. Considering how hard she tried to keep this very thing from happening the past months, it bothers her surprisingly little now that it has. She’s not panicking and she’s still here and there’s still a strong sense of  _rightness_  in just being with him. And that’s when Clarke decides to stop fighting whatever is between them and see where it will lead.

“Okay.”

“Okay what?”

“Okay, we won’t be  _just_  fucking anymore. Whatever that means.”

There’s a moment of silence, then he kisses the side of her neck, and his voice sounds different when he replies, a little choked up but as if he’s smiling at the same time.

“We’ll find out, I guess.”

What it mostly means, it turns out, is a lot more of what they already have, sex and talking and easy companionship; but with a lot less self-denial and lying to their friends and, Clarke has to grudgingly admit, a lot more happiness.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the Marc Twain quote "Denial ain't just a river in Egypt" (at least the Internet says it's by Mark Twain).


End file.
